Sunday, July 8, 2012

Needing a Filibuster

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2009)

I watched Frank
Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
again the other week. It’s never been one of my absolute favourites, but that’s
hardly to say I’m immune to it. Early on, when James Stewart’s wide-eyed newly
minted senator plays hooky to check out the Lincoln memorial and mists up over
the Gettysburg address, and Capra all but allows the celluloid to melt in
patriotic bliss, I’m just doing all I can not to fast forward. Later, after his
attempt to stand up to the corrupt political machine gets him framed and
shamed, he goes back to the statue bitter and disillusioned now by all the
imperial hypocrisy, until Jean Arthur’s character points out a way to
redemption: turn up at his expulsion hearing and play the Senate filibuster rules,
holding the floor and delaying the vote, while she works the press to get out
the truth and marshal public opinion behind him. Stewart’s performance in the
home stretch, ranging from passionate oratory to corny charm as exhaustion
overtakes him, is of course one of the cornerstones of his acting legend, and
still exhilarating to watch.

Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington

Capra’s film is
ultimately an emphatic validation of the system: maybe you can never entirely
get rid of the special interests, but if the people elevate the right
representatives, who then channel the inherent greatness of America’s core
values, its pure and deep waters will always rise to swallow up the trash. It’s
key to this that the Senate rules aren’t presented as the silly cookbook of self-absorbed
garbage that they are, but rather as almost mystically well-balanced, holding
infinite policy complexity in balance and yet occasionally allowing a necessary
inspirational reboot. Based on the film’s own logic, nevertheless, it shouldn’t
work – Stewart collapses of exhaustion, thus ending his stand, and it’s only
through a deus ex machina that the
corrupt senator cracks up at that same moment, tries to shoot himself, and
blurts out the truth. The film’s underlying logic points more directly to Stewart
regaining some respect and credibility through his stand, but still losing the
battle for now (if not the longer-term war).

Of course, the
world of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
is almost infinitely simpler than our own: the political machine for example is
able to effectively take over every media outlet in the state, suppressing any
and all news that doesn’t fit its agenda. Our fragmented culture has problems
galore, but at least seems capable of avoiding that kind of media blackout
(however, as in the early and seemingly bright days of Bush’s war on terror,
the media frequently blacks itself out). Capra’s film is obviously immensely
simplified: timelines are condensed, events are brightly outlined; surely even
in 1939 it must have been far removed from verisimilitude. But that central
notion about the individual’s capacity to take on the system certainly seemed
to people to embody a broader truth, and still does even today.

Can’t We Just Talk?

This is what makes
the movie so depressing though, as the notion of Obama as a transformative
change agent increasingly seems further and further away. All through the
election I worried about this: Bush was such an obvious boob that at least
those of us who despaired for America had the comfort of saying, well, he’s an
idiot, of course everything’s wrong. But if Obama, seemingly as decent and
progressive (and by virtue of just being there, given where he started,
seemingly capable of figuring out and mastering essentially anything) were to fail, where would our
hope come from after that? This, horribly, increasingly seems to be where we’re
going. The terrible spectacle of Obama’s teetering health care initiative tells
you a lot, but the most depressing thing to me is the apparent impossibility of
conducting a sane debate. Surely everyone acknowledges on some level that
things can’t go on as they are: that health care is the most urgent example of
almost unlimited needs and demands straining against scary fiscal limitations.
If there were any sanity to this, we’d be observing an extended public debate
on trade-offs and values and choices and responsibilities. Instead, we hear
about death panels and Nazis and socialism, occasionally yielding to abstract
sparring about private versus public options, taxing versus spending. Capra’s
crooked Senator motivated by a self-serving construction contract is
chickenfeed when set against representatives whose whole ideology, untempered
by much intellectual curiosity or sense of broader responsibility and crisis,
will always boil everything down to a few inflexible litmus tests. Not to
mention how blind party affiliation allows rabid antipathy to something over here to coexist with happy indifference
to something over there, no matter
that they might be factually or morally indistinguishable, if the political
warfront happens to cross in between.

My point isn’t
literally that we need a Jimmy Stewart (the closest thing we got to that was
Ronald Reagan, which worked out a different way), but we so need someone or something to refresh and realign us. But the economic crisis should
have been one of the biggest wake-up calls imaginable, and yet it changed
nothing – the entire institutional and policy-making momentum seems to be not
to learn and improve from it, but merely to find a way to get back to where we
were, regardless that it proved itself putridly flawed. There’s no shortage of
commentators to tell us this, but it’s all for nothing. So what the hell are we
going to do?

District 9

Deliberately or
not, the new science-fiction hit District
9 embodies much of our lost capacity for achievement. The great event we’ve
long dreamed of finally happens: a spaceship full of aliens enters our orbit,
and the best mankind can think to do with them is stick them in a horrible
stinking settlement camp and meanwhile plunder their technology for commercial
gain. Since it’s set in South Africa, and the alien camps look much the same as
the black townships, it’s tempting to see some apartheid message in here, but
the situation plays more as a reiteration of that history than an illumination
of it (if anything even remains to be illuminated). Actually, I found myself
thinking more of the current The Cove:
given how we treat the dolphins, why would the aliens fare any better? The film
shows all this being handled exclusively as a local problem, with no mention of
the UN or other international interests, further suggesting a world that might
be losing its ability to lift up its head.

Having set up this
intriguing theme, and after laying down some very good initial scenes, District 9 becomes an increasingly
conventional chase/conspiracy thriller, with an initially nerdy bureaucrat
transforming himself into an all-action superman, happily leaping over holes in
the plot. But since mankind as a whole increasingly suggests it doesn’t deserve
and can’t do justice to anything other than the mediocre and the ugly, I guess
that’s just fine.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).